Building a Curved Handrail

Bending rail gets you halfway there, but you still have to fit all of the pieces together

Thanks to bending rail, it's not that difficult to form curved handrail sections for a circular staircase on site. But cutting the fittings and assembling the rail can be tricky, especially when the stair also has doglegs or landings that alter its run. These transitions have to be finessed to make the handrail look as if it uniformly follows the steps - even though the rail height keeps changing from tread to tread.I recently built a circular staircase that has a short landing in the middle and a dogleg at the bottom after three straight steps. In this article, I'll...